It is useful at this point to give some illustrations

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Unformatted text preview: g some of these key structures.
Structures that describe the product system
include, but are not limited to, the requirements tree,
system architecture, and certain symbolic information
such as system drawings, schematics, and databases.
The structures that describe the producing system
include the project's work breakdown, schedules, cost
accounts, and organization. These structures provide
different perspectives on their common raison d'etre: the
desired product system. Creating a fundamental
harmony among these structures is essential for
successful systems engineering and project management; this harmony needs to be established in some
cases by one-to-one correspondence between two structures, and in other cases, by traceable links across
several structures. It is useful, at this point, to give some
illustrations of this key principle.
System requirements serve two purposes in the
systems engineering process: first, they represent a
hierarchical description of the buyer's desired product
system as understood by the product development team
(PDT). The interaction between the buyer and system
engineer to develop these requirements is one way the
&quot;voice of the buyer&quot; is heard. Determining the right
requirements— that is, only those that the informed
buyer is willing to pay for—is an important part of the
system engineer's job. Second, system requirements
also communicate to the design engineers what to
design and build (or code). As these requirements are
allocated, they become inexorably linked to the system
architecture and product breakdown, which consists of
the hierarchy of system, segments, elements,
subsystems, etc. (See the sidebar on system terminology on page 3.) The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is also a
tree-like structure that contains the pieces of work
necessary to complete the project. Each task in the
WBS should be traceable to one or more of the system
requirements. Schedules, which are structured as
networks, describe the time-phased activities that result
in the product system in the WBS. The cost...
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